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Jamie,
Many thanks for the question. Here's what I mean:
If you go back about five hundred years, you find a world where existence is pretty fragile for everybody. Even a very wealthy family from 1500 enjoyed only a handful of the material comforts that are available to billions today as a matter of routine.
In particular, death from disease, complications of childbirth, malnutrition, war or famine was only a heartbeat away.
During those five hundred years, parts of the world have seen extraordinary development, starting with the Industrial Revolution in the UK and Europe and continuing with the blossoming of global trade and then the rise of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Other parts of the world have seen very little of this development. In fact, for some of them things have got worse, because population densities have increased, making previously sustainable ways of life unsustainable.
Right now, in October 2007, the daily death toll from extreme poverty is somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 people. This is not famine, war or natural disaster; it is simply grinding poverty - entire communities routinely having too little food and water to survive, for months or years on end.
The good news, however, is that this number has dropped significantly during the last 20 years. When I first began supporting The Hunger Project in 1988, the daily death toll from what they call chronic persistent hunger was approximately 35,000. And that was against a backdrop of a significantly lower global population.
On the other hand, 20,000 people per day is still a shockingly large number. To put a little more clarity on that, what we're mostly talking about is women and children, especially baby girls, who come a very clear second to baby boys in many African and Asian societies. Given scarce resources in a family in, say, Tamil Nadu, a baby boy will continue to be fed and given water; a baby girl simply won't.
The big answer to all of this is that there are still a number of countries that need, in effect, to go through the industrial revolution. This means the creation of sustainable commerce, formation of capital, development of infrastructure, etc. That, in turn, requires the engagement, empowerment and education of the people in those communities/countries, as well as some changes to rebalance the playing field of global trade.
That, in a nutshell, is what I mean by Global Abundance.
I'll be expanding on many of these topics as the pod develops. If you have any questions in the mean time, please let me know.
All the best,
Patrick
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